In March, I wrote a blog post about Shifting My Focus To Scaling Up. When I look at our Foundry Group portfolio of over 60 companies, I see many of them in two distinct scaling up phases. The first are companies like Yesware that are rapidly growing revenue and customers, are in the 30 to 100 employee range, are dealing with balancing resources to accomplish their goals, but have an incredible amount of open ground in front of them. The second are companies like Fitbit that are clear leaders in their market, are on the 100 to 500 person ramp, and pacing the innovation in their market segment. Many of them are companies that aren’t overhyped because they are Silent Killers, a particular type of company we love to fund and work with.

Yesware has now shifted from the startup phase to the scaling up phase. There’s an entirely new level of organizational development, different set of challenges, leveling up of leadership and management skill sets, and massive opening of new opportunities given the resources that the company now has.

I find this a particularly exciting time in the life of a company. And a very challenging one. Fortunately, Matthew continues to surround himself with amazing people, such as his first outside board member, Dave Girouard, who recently ran the entire Google Apps business and is now CEO/founder of Upstart and his newest board member Neeraj Agrawal from Battery Ventures.

Plus, Matthew has a bunch of peers in our portfolio to talk to. We are together with many of them today in another Foundry Group summit – this time for full executive teams across our portfolio right in the middle of Denver Startup Week. Like all of our internal events, our goal is an extremely high signal to noise ratio. We leave the pomp and circumstance to others.

The enormous and powerful conversation around “startups” will continue. But as I turn more of my attention to “scaleups” I believe the next phase is even more powerful.

Very cool product Brad and I really admire their commitment in attacking the problem first & then with the integration just nailed it to what the users really needed to save time in the Sales cycle (Gmail + Salesforce).

Thanks for the kind words, Clint. In our earliest days of Yesware I was really surprised at how much Brad and Rich Miner encouraged/made us focus focus focus. Going into the VC relationship I expected them to be pushing us to expand with a land grab. Luckily for us, they both understand that, even with everything going for us, we can only go a step or two at a time. Focus.

http://www.cazoomi.com/ Clint Wilson

Exactly Matthew and that is why Brad is so smart:) as if you really just focus on your long term strategy, focus on solving your target customers problems the rest seems to fall in place.

I have learned a lot from sports over the years and land grab strategies in tech land are kind of like Pro Football dreams, in that only about .08% of those coming out of the best high schools trying out make it thru the gauntlet:)

Yesware is awesome. Our sales team loves it. Funny that you mention fitbit because a few of us at work have one! I wonder what is the correlation between yesware users and fitbit users? It seems fitbit can target yesware users